by Hilary Boyd
Wearily he opened the door. He would shower and change, go back and meet her friends, then maybe talk to her later tonight, when they were alone. His thoughts elsewhere, he was not immediately aware of the figure propped up on the sofa in the dim light of his nanna’s sitting room, the bald head lolling forward. But the sound of his entry must have jogged the man awake, because he jumped, Freddy jumped, and then they both froze.
‘Dad . . .’ It was almost a question. His father looked like a ghost of his former muscled self. Despite that, as Vinnie Slater began to struggle to his feet, Freddy felt his bowels turn to water.
Fully upright, Vinnie faced his son, hands on his hips. His mean blue eyes were now pale and watery, his skin purplish from the emphysema, cheeks sunken, with deep furrows etched from his nose to his chin. But he straightened his shoulders and gave his son a sly raise of an eyebrow. ‘Thought I’d surprise you.’
Freddy was unable to reply. The sight of his father, even in this decayed state, was reducing him, making his body tremble all over as it had when he was a boy. His instinct was to turn tail and flee.
Vinnie was obviously unsteady on his feet and having trouble getting his breath, but he stood his ground. ‘Wanted to spend some time with my son before I die,’ he was saying, as Freddy moved reluctantly into the room. ‘And I thought, No fucking chance he’s coming to me, so I’ll have to get my arse in gear and go to him.’ He gave a short snort of laughter, coughed painfully, and shook his head at Freddy. ‘Look as if you’ve seen a ghost, son. Sit down . . . Been a long night, has it?’ A leer replaced the laugh.
Freddy, still trembling inside, sat down on one of the two kitchen chairs, as far from his father as he could get in the small room. ‘What do you want?’
After another painful spasm of coughing, Vinnie said, ‘Not going to offer your old man a cup of tea? I’m parched, got up at four this morning to catch the sodding plane.’ He chuckled. ‘Gave me a wheelchair at the airport. Didn’t ask for one. Obviously reckoned I was about to conk out.’ His words were interspersed with short, snatched breaths.
Freddy filled the plastic kettle, switched it on, mechanically reached for a cup and the tin that contained teabags, opened the tiny fridge for the milk, which he sniffed to check it wasn’t on the turn. Handing his father the tea, into which he’d stirred two teaspoons of sugar – a default memory from his childhood, he didn’t even ask – he retreated to his seat at the table. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
Vinnie raised his eyebrows, sipped his tea. Freddy didn’t go on and there was a stand-off between the two men in the silent room.
Freddy realized he didn’t know how to relate to the person he called ‘Dad’. He’d walked out of the house on his sixteenth birthday and never returned, only bumping into his father in and around Leicester during the years, post-school, when he’d worked tossing burgers in a Wimpy Bar, as a porter at the Royal Infirmary, behind the bar in the Merry Monarch. Vinnie always made a point of tracking him down, either at work – humiliating in front of his colleagues – or in the dismal bedsits he rented. He came to bully him, to demand he come home, although why he wanted him home Freddy had no idea, since he made no bones about how much he’d always disliked and resented his son.
Tension distorted the silence, broken only by his father’s grating cough.
Freddy said, ‘Is death making you sentimental, then, Dad?’ The sarcasm felt daunting, even though the figure in front of him was a pathetic old man whom Freddy could have dashed to the floor with a single swipe of his hand. A similar challenge when he was a boy had triggered days of terrifying mind games from Vinnie, culminating in a sadistic near-death assault.
His father’s answer surprised him. ‘I’m not given to sentiment, as you know . . .’ Here Vinnie paused. ‘But not having long makes you think.’ He stopped again, his breath raspy and elusive. ‘I wanted to make things right with you, son. I know I haven’t always been kind to you.’
Freddy felt his mouth hang open. Is he apologizing? He gave a short laugh. ‘Understatement of the century,’ he said.
Vinnie nodded slowly. ‘I know, I know . . . I deserved that. Different times.’
‘There was never a time when beating a child to a pulp and enjoying it was acceptable.’ He heard his voice, surprisingly light, almost flippant, as if he were scared to put more emphasis on his words.
‘You were a difficult boy.’ Vinnie shrugged. ‘But I never enjoyed it, you can’t accuse me of that.’
Freddy saw a spark of the old malice reflected in the watery eyes. So much for the apology. He got up. ‘No point in talking about it, Dad. If you want forgiveness, then you’ve come to the wrong place.’
But Vinnie suddenly looked frightened and feeble. ‘Look, son, there’s no need to be like that, is there? Can’t you let bygones by bygones, give an old man some peace?’
Incredulous, Freddy stared down at him. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? What you did to me as a child is beyond forgiveness. Beyond belief, in fact. And why should you care anyway? Don’t tell me you’re scared of hellfire and damnation?’
He’d been joking, his father a famously ranting atheist. So when Vinnie didn’t immediately scoff at the idea, Freddy’s eyes widened. ‘You’re afraid of God? Seriously? Since when?’
Vinnie just shrugged his thin shoulders again.
Freddy remembered those shoulders when they had been ten times the size, bulging with muscle and hate, towering over him on that sacrificial chair. ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘I like it. My father, afraid of the Almighty! Makes me want to believe in Him myself, someone who can bring about such an astonishing miracle. Makes me want to hug Him.’
‘Stop that.’
‘Remember the vitriol, Dad? The piss you took when Mum wanted to go to church?’ he said softly. ‘She begged for a priest when she was dying.’ For a moment he saw his mother’s emaciated face, yellowed and skeletal from the cancer, heard her crying softly. ‘I remember,’ he said quietly. Freddy turned on his heel, still shaking, and made for the bedroom where he quickly packed some clothes in his canvas holdall. He realized he was actually frightened that his father would stop him leaving, although in Vinnie’s present state the idea was ludicrous. He strode back into the sitting room and made for the front door, barely glancing at his father, who was slumped, once more, on the sofa.
‘Fred, Fred, come back.’ Vinnie was struggling to his feet again. Wobbling as he stood, he reached for the back of the sofa and steadied himself. Through tight, laboured breaths, he managed to say, ‘I came all this way for you. I’m not well, you must see that. If you leave you might never see me again.’ He broke off to lean on the table, bent over, head down, air rasping in his throat. ‘I need you to understand.’
Seeing him so reduced, his now reedy voice whining with self-pity, was almost more nauseating to Freddy than the historic savagery. He had no pity for his father, only pity for himself that he couldn’t have the fight he’d rehearsed so often in his dreams, in which he beat the living daylights out of Vinnie and made him beg for mercy, reducing him to tears as Freddy had so often been as a child. Seeing the old man so diminished, through no agency of his own, made him feel cheated. ‘You aren’t even sorry.’
Vinnie straightened up, his eyes clouding as he stared at his son. And Freddy saw the previously pleading look change in an instant. He almost recoiled as his father’s voice became suffused with age-old contempt.
‘Still the little victim, eh?’ Vinnie harrumphed, coughed. ‘You and your whining mother . . . I tried to put some mettle into you, son. Tried to make a man of you.’ He coughed again, gave a harsh laugh. ‘Seems I didn’t do much of a job.’
‘No,’ Freddy said quietly. ‘No, you didn’t. But if being a man means taking sadistic pleasure in beating a child half to death . . . if being a man means being like you, Dad, then I’ll pass.’
‘Where are you going?’ he heard his fathe
r’s querulous voice as he closed the door on his grandmother’s flat. As he flew down the stone stairs, two at a time, he knew he would never go back there.
*
He arrived at Shirley’s apartment breathless, trembling with shock. He felt like a terrified boy again, the lifetime of effort he’d expended to make himself forget, to build a carapace over that shaking, blubbering child he so despised, seemed to count for nothing now. And he found himself asking over and over the question he’d avoided for decades: Where were you, Mum? Why didn’t you protect me? Why didn’t you stop him hurting me?
‘Freddy? Are you okay, hon?’ Shirley’s face was full of concern as she opened the door, taking in his distressed appearance, the small bag he held. She looked particularly glamorous today, he thought, her sea-green silk shirt, white jeans and elegant gold-chain necklace – all carefully chosen in honour of her friends, no doubt.
She pulled him into the kitchen. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Whatever’s happened?’
Freddy tried to speak, but all he wanted to do was cry.
Shooting a glance through the door towards the balcony, where Freddy could hear her friends chatting and laughing, Shirley moved closer.
‘Hey,’ she said, taking him in her arms, ‘hey, it’s okay . . . it’s okay, I’m here . . .’ muttering soothing words he barely heard as she drew his head to her shoulder and held him like a mother would.
Choking back his tears, terrified that if he let go now he would crack into a thousand pieces, he felt his chest fluttering with the smallest, softest breaths he would allow himself, not letting the air go too deep and tap into where the darkness lay. And after a few minutes he felt the urge to cry receding, the threatening chaos once more forced back into the box that had contained it his whole life.
Shirley stroked his hair, brought her face up to his, kissed him gently on the lips, her blue eyes searching, trying to reach his pain.
Freddy pulled back, taking her hands in his and squeezing them gratefully. ‘God, I’m sorry, Shirley. I’m so sorry. Thanks . . . Listen, I’ll explain later,’ he said, nodding towards the balcony.
‘Are you sure you’re all right now? Why don’t you go freshen up, hon, give yourself a few minutes? They’re on their second gin, they won’t notice a thing.’ She smiled and pushed him towards the bathroom.
Chapter 36
It had gone on all day, the lunch, everyone, particularly Freddy, getting drunker and drunker as the hours passed. After Marty and Jill had finally gone back to their hotel, Shirley settled in beside Freddy on his lounger on the terrace in the dark. It must have gone midnight and he was in that blank, regretful phase of drunkenness, where the fun part of inebriation has worn off, the hangover not yet kicked in, but another drink is a horrible thought and the dread of pillow spin stops you attempting to lie down.
‘You were a big hit,’ Shirley whispered, her head nuzzled coyly into his shoulder. ‘Jill thought you were so funny and sooo cute. She just adored your showbiz stories.’
He heard her give a contented sigh. Jill, he thought – a chirpy, straightforward woman with a sensible grey bob and a warm smile – had liked him. But Marty’s rather persistent, not-so-subtle questions – about Freddy’s work, his background and his plans to stay in Malta – had signalled suspicion.
The man, a tall, thin, patrician type with a weather-beaten face, mane of white hair and an arrogant bearing, had spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of Shirley’s Chase in calculatedly extreme terms. What an awesome friend . . . exemplary husband . . . remarkable sailor. What a cut above the average, a person of stature. Very much missed. On Marty had gone about Chase Solaris. The subtext being: Who the fuck do you think you are, you worm, trying to fill this giant’s shoes? The subtext being: Gigolo. Or so Freddy, paranoid and rattled by his encounter with his father, gleaned from Marty’s conversation.
He didn’t even try to defend himself. He did feel like a worm, a sponger, a gigolo. It was what he’d probably have called someone like him in similar circumstances. Shirley tried to big him up, tried to get him to repeat the stories he’d told her about all the famous people he’d worked and hung out with. But that only seemed to make matters worse. With every tale Freddy obediently dragged up from his past, Marty’s expression became more cynical, more disbelieving.
‘You’re a serious player by the sound of it,’ Marty had said, not without a hint of sarcasm, at one point late in the afternoon, when they were strolling back, replete with crab linguine, veal Milanese, lemon sorbet, espresso and amaretti biscotti, to Shirley’s condo after lunch in the marina. ‘I can’t imagine you’ll be in this backwater long.’
Shirley and her friend were up ahead, talking nineteen to the dozen, not listening.
‘Oh, I love it here,’ Freddy said, to wind him up. ‘My mother was Maltese.’
Marty cast him a sidelong glance, perhaps concluding that this explained a lot.
‘Shirley’s a wonderful woman,’ Freddy added with enthusiasm.
‘She sure is, Freddy. But vulnerable too.’
‘Vulnerable?’ Freddy assumed a look of mild puzzlement.
‘You know . . . a widow, all alone. She’s been so lost since Chase passed.’
‘So she says. I think it’s a wonderful thing, having a long and loving marriage like theirs. We should all be envious.’
Marty couldn’t have been sure how to take this because he didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, his voice very low, with only a hint of warning, ‘Listen, I don’t know what sort of relationship you two have, and I don’t want to, none of my business, but I owe it to Chase to keep an eye on Shirley, make sure she’s good.’
‘She’s very lucky to have a friend like you, Marty,’ Freddy said, smiling genially at the American, leaving him nowhere to go with his questioning. It was a small victory. But, in truth, Marty was right, and Freddy knew it. He also knew that something had changed today. Shirley’s motherly concern, her pleasure in introducing him to her friends, her protection of him in the face of Marty’s suspicion, it felt newly proprietorial. Whatever she said – or didn’t say – it was clear she expected more than he would ever be able to give her.
‘Come to bed,’ she said now, as they sat squashed together on the lounger, a chilly breeze suddenly blowing up from the sea. ‘It’s getting cold out here.’
It was an invitation, not the usual suggestion to turn in. Shirley took him by the hand and led him into her room. It was the first time he hadn’t slept in the spare room, been visited silently in the night for sex. Freddy felt instantly uneasy, awkward in this new mode, but she didn’t given him time for qualms, pushing him down on the bed as she leaned over to kiss him and began to unzip his jeans.
That night she was voracious. None of the silently covert seduction of past encounters. Freddy, drunk and worn out by the events of the day, wanted only to sleep, but Shirley was getting her money’s worth. She kept him awake for what seemed like a very long time, her appetite unquenchable as her body writhed with his, her cries and groans reaching a hopeful – to Freddy, at least – crescendo, then dying down, mounting again as she moved to straddle him, or pushed him down between her legs, then brought her mouth dangerously tight around his erection. They were soon both slick and wet with sweat, the dim light from the bedside lamp casting grotesque shadows of their antics. He wondered if this was how a prostitute might feel as he longed for it to be over.
The following morning, with the cerebral thump of a hangover from hell, Freddy lay in Shirley’s bed with a cringing feeling in his gut. The tempting smell of coffee wafted through to him and Shirley could be heard singing softly in the kitchen, no doubt preparing another perfect breakfast. But he knew all this was over. It had gone too far.
*
‘I have to take my father home,’ he lied to her over breakfast. ‘He’s too ill to go by himself.’ He explained the previous evening that
his distress earlier in the day had been because of a fight with his father, although he didn’t mention the reason, or anything to do with the past.
She was full of sympathy. ‘I’ll take you both to the airport.’
He thanked her, told her no. It was agony watching her worried face across the table, knowing how much she had invested in him. He felt like the worst bastard on the planet. Lily, now Shirley . . . Freddy didn’t want to be that sort of man.
‘You’ll be back soon?’ she asked.
‘I hope so. But Dad is basically dying.’
She didn’t push it: she was too mature, too polite for that, but her blue eyes were full of hope as they kissed goodbye. He could see she was waiting for more assurances than he could give her.
She’ll forget about me soon enough, he told himself as he stood by the bus stop in the Mediterranean sunshine, waiting for the bus that would take him to the airport, feeling like a fugitive all over again. But he hated what he had done to her.
*
The hotel Freddy had booked online earlier, as he waited at Malta International for his flight home, was modern and ugly. But it was also dirt cheap, a chain with a summer promotion right by Gatwick Airport. His room was basic, a dull cream and brown, but clean enough. Nobody bothered him, the revolving-door stream of tourists – most there for a night, tops – meant that the staff was not really concerned about getting involved with the guests. The thunderous clap of jets passing overhead every couple of minutes, inadequately muted by what should have been better soundproofing in such a new building, was his only companion.
In his last-minute exit from Malta six days earlier, Freddy had booked for two weeks, although he hoped to stay for a shorter time. He had a plan, and to this end had carried out a vast amount of research as he sat alone in his hotel room, often working manically late into the night at his laptop, fuelled by disgusting instant coffee, sachets of which the maids replaced every morning on the tray inside the brown MDF cupboard.